This study conducts an in-depth analysis of the connotations, structure, effectiveness, and evolutionary trends of digital governance policies, with the aim of providing a scientific basis for their optimization. The research begins by clarifying the background and significance of the study, defining core concepts, and establishing a theoretical and methodological foundation through a systematic review of domestic and international literature. Employing a grounded theory approach, the study performs a detailed analysis of digital governance policy texts. Using NVivo 20 and Gephi software, conceptual categories are constructed to identify key terms and their structural relationships within the policies. A three-dimensional "structure–instrument–effectiveness" evaluation framework is further developed to comprehensively assess digital governance policies. The X-axis represents policy structure and issuing authorities, the Y-axis categorizes types of policy instruments, and the Z-axis evaluates policy effectiveness using the PMC index model. In addition, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling are applied to identify key stakeholders and coalitions within the policy texts, examining their roles in the policy evolution process and uncovering thematic shifts in policy emphasis. Finally, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist index model are used to evaluate the performance of digital governance development across provinces, assessing the practical outcomes of policy implementation. By integrating textual analysis and performance evaluation results, this study provides a holistic review of the current state of digital governance policies in China. Multidimensional optimization pathways are proposed to support the continuous improvement and upgrading of these policies, thereby contributing to the realization of the Digital China vision.
Huixia Luo (Sat,) studied this question.